We’re entering a new era of software.

Not just at the high-powered, VC-backed level where LLMs let teams build sophisticated apps in months instead of years — but at the opposite end of the spectrum, too.

A whole new category is emerging: nano applications.

These are apps built for a tiny niche purpose. They’re not designed to scale, not meant for mass market, not built to generate millions. They’re built for one person, or maybe a handful of people. They’re built because they’re useful, fun, and suddenly possible.

Before, these kinds of tools were the domain of hobbyist engineers who’d work their day job and then tinker at night — wiring IoT devices, scraping data for their next trip, building a wedding planner that pulled pricing from 15 different sites. Cool projects, but they’d take weeks of moonlighting.

Now? They can be built in a single afternoon.

I’ve seen this in my own life. My blog has tools that would’ve been too laborious to justify in the past. A custom Markdown pipeline that transpiles posts into exactly the format and style I want. A quotes page for every book I read — where a few photos of text become a JSON of highlights that publish directly to my site. A tool that takes a podcast or YouTube URL, transcribes it, surfaces key names and bullet points, and drops them into my digital knowledge store.

These aren’t monetizable. They’re not startups. They’re nano apps — tiny bits of software that make my creative life easier and richer.

And I keep finding new opportunities.

Take my band. Gig logistics are a nightmare: emails flying back and forth, players confirming or not confirming, details getting lost. Before, I’d never build a tool for that. It would take days — not worth the effort for a group that isn’t pulling $10k shows. But today? I could spin up a simple band management app in an afternoon, something that auto-parses booking emails and organizes them.

That’s the shift: not just massive software powered by VCs, but highly personal nano applications built by individuals. Soon, as the line between hard code and natural language blurs, even non-developers will be able to make them.

It’s an exciting time — not only because of what’s possible at scale, but because of what’s now possible in the small.